macOS Unlocker v4 for VMware ESXi

This is currently being developed and not ready for use

Original repositories: DrDonk/esxi-unlocker

Download ESXi 8.0 (integrated Unlocker and SLIC)

Newly released, now tested to support ESXi 8.0.

1. Introduction

Unlocker 4 is designed for VMware ESXi 7.

The Unlocker enables certain flags and data tables that are required to see the macOS type when setting the guest OS type, and modify the implmentation of the virtual SMC controller device. These capabiltiites are normally exposed in Fusion and ESXi when running on Apple hardware.

The patch code carries out the following modifications dependent on the product being patched:

Patch vmx and derivatives to allow macOS to boot

It is important to understand that the Unlocker cannot add any new capabilities to VMware ESXi but enables support for macOS that is disabled in the VMware products when run on non-Apple hardware.

The Unlocker cannot:

add support for new versions of macOS
add paravirtualized Apple GPU support
add older (non-Ryzen) AMD CPU support

or any other features that are not already in the VMware compiled code.

2. Running the patcher

The ESXi unlocker will need to be run each time the ESXi Server is restarted or upgraded

It is also best to switch ESXi to Maintanence mode or make sure you do not have any VMs running

The code is written in Python and has no pre-requisites and should run directly from the release zip download.

Download a binary release from https://github.com/DrDonk/esxi-unlocker/releases
Unload the archive to a folder on the ESXi server datastore and extract the files
Navigate to the folder with the extracted files

You will then need to run one of the following commands to patch or unpatch the ESXi software.

unlock - apply patches to VMware
relock - remove patches from VMware
check - check the patch status of your VMware installation

3. FAQS

3.1 Remove older versions of ESXi unlocker

If you hve previously used an earlier version of the ESXi Unlocker please uninstall it by logging into the support console and running:

BootModuleConfig.sh --verbose --remove=unlocker.tgz

and then rebooting the ESXi server.

3.2 AMD CPUs

A patched macOS AMD kernel must be used to run on older AMD systems, but there is a workaround if you have a modern AMD Ryzen CPU. The unlocker cannot patch this but we can recommend settings for the VMX file that allows macOS to run on recent AMD CPUs. The tests are being recorded in this issue, and it would be useful if more can report success or failures in that issue.

DrDonk/unlocker#33

Read this KB article to learn how to edit a guest's VMX file safely https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/2057902

Add the following lines were to the VMX file:

cpuid.0.eax = "0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:1011"
cpuid.0.ebx = "0111:0101:0110:1110:0110:0101:0100:0111"
cpuid.0.ecx = "0110:1100:0110:0101:0111:0100:0110:1110"
cpuid.0.edx = "0100:1001:0110:0101:0110:1110:0110:1001"
cpuid.1.eax = "0000:0000:0000:0001:0000:0110:0111:0001"
cpuid.1.ebx = "0000:0010:0000:0001:0000:1000:0000:0000"
cpuid.1.ecx = "1000:0010:1001:1000:0010:0010:0000:0011"
cpuid.1.edx = "0000:0111:1000:1011:1111:1011:1111:1111"
vhv.enable = "FALSE"
vpmc.enable = "FALSE"

Make sure there are no duplicate lines in the VMX file or the guest will not start and a dictionary error will be displayed by VMware.
You can now install and run macOS as a guest.

4. Thanks

Thanks to Zenith432 for originally building the C++ Unlocker and Mac Son of Knife (MSoK) for all the testing and support.

Thanks also to Sam B for finding the solution for ESXi 6 and helping me with debugging expertise. Sam also wrote the code for patching ESXi ELF files and modified the Unlocker code to run on Python 3 in the ESXi 6.5 environment.

Thanks to lucaskamp for testing the new version 4 of ESXi Unlocker.

allegrox/esxi-unlocker-4